All government investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks is now closed, the United States Justice Department, FBI and US Postal Inspection Service announced Friday.
Shortly after 9/11, five people were killed and 17 others became ill after letters laced with anthrax were sent through the US mail. The authorities believe the attacks were planned and executed by the late Bruce Ivins, a biodefence researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases who committed suicide while under investigation for the crime in 2008.
The 92-page “Amerithrax” summary of the “largest investigation into a bio-weapons attack in US history” painted a portrait of Ivins as a troubled scientist whose career was teetering toward failure (Star Tribune). He feared his 20-year career in the anthrax vaccine program was being phased out. “Following the anthrax attacks, however, his program was suddenly rejuvenated,” says the Los Angeles Times. He also repeatedly cast suspicion on his colleagues.
While briefly hospitalized for his first articulated suicide plan in the spring of 2008, Ivins wrote: “O, Healer! O devoter of your life to the lives of others! I can hurt, kill, and terrorize, but others place me with the vilest of the vile… The state smells its carniverous [sic] death-blood sacrifice. I look into the mirror and cry out who it is.” In June 2008 emails, he made several non-denial denials, including quotes such as “I can tell you, I am not a killer at heart” and “I don’t think of myself as a vicious, a, a nasty evil person [sic]” and “I, in my right mind wouldn’t do it.”
Experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences have reviewed the FBI’s scientific evidence against Ivins. Last year, they found that the deadly spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis mailed to news media and congressional offices share a chemical ‘fingerprint’ that is not found in bacteria from the flask linked to Ivins (Nature News). But the chemical mismatch doesn’t necessarily mean that deadly spores used in the attacks did not originate from Ivins’s flask.
Some maintain that the investigation should stay open. “Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,” said Congressman Rush Holt, a physicist from New Jersey (New York Times). “The evidence the FBI produced would not, I think, stand up in court.”
The handling of the investigation has been criticized by Ivins’s colleagues and others pointing out multiple gaps, including a lack of hair, fibre or other physical evidence directly linking Ivins to the anthrax letters (Washington Post). But the summary ends, “the investigation into the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 has been concluded”.